Kidnapped Missouri Boy Had Two Encounters With Police: Report
Posted January 21, 2007 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
The 15-year-old Missouri boy recently reunited with his parents after he was kidnapped four years ago reportedly had two encounters with police, one of them less than a year after he was abducted.
Shawn Hornbeck disappeared in October of 2002 when he was 11-years-old and was found last week at the Kirkwood, Mo. home of his alleged kidnapper, Michael Devlin, shortly after another boy, 13-year-old Ben Ownby, went missing after stepping off his school bus days earlier.
Both boys were found in the apartment.
A published report in Missouri claims Hornbeck came face to face with police officers 10 months after he disappeared.
The boy apparently told the officers his name was Shawn Devlin and gave no indication that he was a missing child. Hornbeck told the cops his bike had been stolen from outside the apartment he shared with Devlin, who told neighbours and others that he was the child’s father.
Kim Evans, a friend of Hornbeck’s family, was stunned that officers didn’t recognize the missing child.
“You would think someone would have recognized him,” she said.
“But it’s hard to say.”
Then four months ago an officer stopped Hornbeck late at night because he was wearing dark clothes and didn’t have reflectors on his bike, a Missouri newspaper reports. Once again, the boy told police his name was Shawn Devlin and that his birthday was July 7, 1991 – 10 days after his actual date of birth.
The officer said he had no reason to think the boy was anyone other than who he said he was.
Hornbeck appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show earlier this week and noted off camera that he never tried to escape his abductor because he was terrorized. The teen’s parents believe his alleged captor sexually abused him and his grandmother said he was deprived of sleep.
Hornbeck also admitted that he posted messages on websites his parents had set up to find him. One read: “how long are you going to keep searching for your son?”
The family received so many false comments on the site that the true cries for help were disregarded; a fact that still haunts Hornbeck’s stepfather Craig Akers.
“Never in my wildest dreams would have I have imagined it was my son who had done that,” Akers said.
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